


But Whichever Way I Go (I come back to the place you are)

by WishingStar



Series: Flare [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Hand-Waved Neuroscientific Technobabble, Have Some Angst With Your Angst, M/M, So much angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2017-01-03
Packaged: 2018-09-08 21:07:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8862073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WishingStar/pseuds/WishingStar
Summary: On Steve's fourth day in 2012, a nurse asks him how he's feeling.
He should feel something, probably.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'd planned to finish off this series in one final multi-chapter fic. Then I encountered Significant Literary Reasons why I should instead split it into several smaller fics, despite the fact that these smaller fics aren't remotely intended to stand alone.
> 
> And by Significant Literary Reasons, I mean I wanted to pull a title from Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes," but I love that song so much I couldn't possibly limit myself to just one line.
> 
> And once again, I do apologize for the wait.

Steve wakes in a false world.

They put him on a stage set (he's seen enough of them to know), play a pre-recorded baseball game and try to convince him it's 1945. But that's only the first layer of falsehood. The second layer hovers on the edge of his awareness, insidious; he can't pinpoint its nature. The New York he saw outside the SHIELD facility, with its blacktop expanses and screeching cars and billboards, couldn't possibly be faked. The technology inside SHIELD would flabbergast even Howard Stark. He believes Nick Fury, who speaks with unguarded assurance and shares the details of his recovery from the ice. Yet every moment has a muted, surreal quality, like a dream. Like he's still underwater, near-weightless but unable to breathe. Like—like he's trapped in a blown egg, painted shell concealing a perfectly hollow center. If he wanted, he could punch through that shell like he punched through the chipboard wall of the set on which he woke, and the real world—whatever the hell that meant—would spill inside. If he wanted.

He should want something, probably.

On the morning of the fourth day, a nurse comes into the room where they're keeping him. She bites her lip and hugs a clipboard to her chest, and stops inside the doorway like she's unsure of her welcome. Steve wonders if she's one of those employees who's whispered about him outside his door, unaware that he can hear.

The agents and doctors who've interacted with him maintain a cool professionality, as though dead soldiers drop by their facility every day. He thought at first maybe they did—that maybe his body was still slowly freezing, while his soul had gone on to a liminal place between this world and the next. The kind of place that took whatever form you most expected, passed judgment on your life, and sent you on to reunite with loved ones who'd gone before. But the whispers outside his door convinced him otherwise.

"Captain Rogers, am I interrupting?" the nurse says in a rush. Even the star-struck ones don't behave this nervously. Steve hauls out an approximation of his old stage-tour smile and wonders what unpleasant message she's tasked with carrying. They've already covered _everyone you know is dead or senile_ , so unless she breaks the news that the Nazis have won and SHIELD is an underground resistance movement, Steve doubts whatever she has to say will impact him much.

Even if she does tell him the Nazis have won, he might just find he doesn't _care_.

"Not at all," he says. His voice cracks on its first words of the day.

"I just need to ask you a couple questions."

"Sure thing, ma'am." Smile for the cameras. Fury acknowledged the surveillance on the second day, and since then Steve has located two tiny, futuristic cameras in the gym and two more in his own room. He's refrained from reducing them to so much scrap metal because paradoxically, their presence has made the past few days bearable. The show must go on, as the chorus girls used to say; however much you feel like breaking down, the time to fall apart is _after_ curtain call. So the cameras roll, and Steve holds it together. Answers questions, follows instructions, eats what's placed in front of him. Sleeps when he's alone, or tries to. Pretends he isn't seeing ghosts out of the corners of both eyes. One ghost in particular.

"Do you want to sit down?" he offers, gesturing to the desk chair across the room. He's stopped standing every time they enter, since it clearly makes them uncomfortable. Right now he's sitting on the edge of his bed, next to the biography of Harry Truman that appeared yesterday on the bedside table. Presumably someone would prefer him to spend his downtime reading, rather than staring at the gray-flecked tile ceiling.

The nurse shakes her head. "This will only take a minute. And I hope you don't think I'm prying. But the results of your last neural scan weren't... what we expected. It's nothing bad!" she hastens to add, as if Steve might worry. "Well, I mean—of course I don't mean to say it isn't—Captain Rogers, how are you feeling?"

Steve blinks. They've spent the past three days scanning him with machines he can't pronounce, asking him to perform simple tasks, and _mmhmm_ ing at the results. They ought to know how he's feeling as well as he does.

"I'm fine," he says. "Fit as a fiddle, least that's what they tell me."

The nurse gives a tight-lipped smile. "I don't mean physically."

Oh.

Of course—he has emotions, and they can't scan those.

He does have those, right?

Steve puts on his best concerned expression. This one comes out less practiced than the smiles, but it seems more appropriate. "What did the scan tell you?"

She fidgets now, shuffling papers on her clipboard. "Look, we understand wanting to keep it to yourself. Private life, you didn't have much of that in your own time. But we're trying to help you. None of this will leave SHIELD, it's all confidential, I promise. But we need you to be honest." She takes a deep breath and finishes quickly: "Did you bond a soulmate during the war?"

Steve's heart jumps into his throat—a conditioned response, born of a lifetime spent desperately avoiding the subject—before he remembers it no longer matters. Bucky's dead and Steve left his life in 1945. No secret from their shared past can hurt either of them, now.

Should he answer truthfully? The flare, the laws of men and God that he and Bucky flouted... and how it fell apart, in the end, in exactly the way a bond _shouldn't_ , with Bucky gone from Steve's soul like he'd never been there at all?

"I'd rather not talk about that," Steve says, which is equally truthful.

"Of course, I'm not asking you to share more than you're comfortable with. I just need verbal confirmation so I can update your file. It's a medical concern, you understand."

For medical purposes, the correct answer is probably _no_. Whatever they had, it disappeared for good some time before Bucky's death, because Steve never felt—

Wait. _Confirmation?_

"Are you telling me you looked into my head and _saw_ a soulmate bond? Or something that looks like one?" He's sitting up straighter now, feeling something that might, if sufficiently amplified, qualify as curiosity.

The nurse flips some papers over. "It certainly has all the hallmarks. But of course the old SSR files have you listed as single, which raised some concern. There's so much we don't know about your physiology—here, see for yourself." She turns the clipboard around.

The inside of Steve's skull, apparently, resembles a lumpy tangle of gray and white streaks on a black background.

"What exactly am I looking at?"

"This is a cross-section of your subcortical layer, specifically the limbic system. It's the part of your brain responsible for processing emotion. As well as a range of other functions—social attachment, conditioned learning, memory encoding and recall, just to name a few. Now this, right here." One latex-gloved finger taps a white spot on the picture, a little below and to the right of center. "The bond creates a small node of hyperconnected brain cells between your right hippocampus and amygdala, and that's what our instruments pick up."

"But you're saying this looks—" _real_ —"it looks like you'd expect. Like everyone else's." _Please be real, please be_ right...

"Honestly, it's textbook. We never see them so clear. Dr. Meyers says you may have singlehandedly confirmed the theoretical model for acute—oh God, I'm sorry." The nurse's hand flies to her mouth. "I'm so sorry, Captain Rogers. You don't care about the latest theoretical breakthrough, do you. You're asking why you woke up feeling... oh God. I am not the right person for this conversation."

"Go on," Steve urges, more sharply than intended. Some of her explanation has gone over his head; the 21st century has such clinical terms for everything. Maybe he's gotten a false impression, spending all his time in SHIELD medical. Maybe ordinary people never, ever refer to their bonds as "limbic system hyperconnectivity" over dinner. Part of him hopes they don't, because Bucky wouldn't have wanted to die for that kind of future.

Another part of him doesn't mind learning every five-syllable word these 21st-century scientists care to dream up, because they have _proof._ They have _photographic evidence_ that the bond between Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes wasn't some twisted malfunction or misfire; no, it was _textbook_. A tension has uncoiled in his chest, releasing a half-forgotten weight he's carried since Bucky fell—since before that, even. He can almost breathe now.

"Please," he tacks on, seeing the nurse's skepticism. "I want to understand." All that remains is to find out how, why, Bucky could die while Steve kept moving, breathing, _waiting_ blithely for the search party to bring him home—

"Well—okay, well. The reason your node shows up so clearly is because the neurons are firing at an incredibly high rate. Almost a localized seizure. It fits the theoretical model for, uh, acute primary-stage bereavement—I'm sorry. Stop me if you don't want to hear it. But the node goes haywire, sends all these random signals out, because it's expecting to receive a signal back but there isn't—it doesn't get one. But we've never directly observed this before, because we've never had a chance to image someone during that critical window of time, within the first six days after their soulmate, uh—passed. Obviously your brain was in stasis when—while you were frozen, it wasn't changing, so in your case we're talking the first six days since you thawed out enough for your brain to realize... I'm sorry, are you sure you want me to go on?"

Steve barely registers the question. He's hearing _the first six days_ echo through his mind and remembering the week and a half it took to get back to base, to make Zola talk, and to prep that last mission to take down the Red Skull. And he remembers with dawning horror _they never saw the body, not with their own eyes_ —

"Captain Rogers?"

Bucky wasn't dead. He wasn't dead when Peggy brought Steve his dogtags. He was out there in the mountains, suffering, alone but for those Russian scouts who lied about finding him and _what were they doing_ but it doesn't matter—none of it matters. This information has come to Steve purely to taunt him, because of course, Bucky is dead now. Steve's _limbic system_ confirms it. Textbook acute primary-stage bereavement.

The nurse is holding out a plastic-wrapped tissue pack. She's pulled the desk chair closer and sat beside him. Steve rubs his face, and comes away with tiny droplets on the water-repellant fabric of his gloves. Huh.

"I can't imagine the shock it must've been," the nurse murmurs, "on top of everything else. Waking up to a bond that had gone extinct while you slept."

Another clinical term, Steve thinks. _Extinct._ It's almost bleak enough. It covers the dull underwater feeling but not the raw wound in the back of his mind, the jagged edges and phantom pains that make his head whip around for every brunet wearing blue, or when the AC unit (that's what they call it) hits a certain pitch and Steve could swear he hears a familiar voice.

The nurse pulls a tissue out of the pack and keeps both hands extended, single tissue in one hand and the rest of the pack in the other. Steve ought to take one, or both. The tears on his cheeks are clearly upsetting her.

After a long silence, the nurse clears her throat. "No one ever came forward claiming to be Captain America's soulmate. Not to the SSR or the press. But if you can give me some identifying information—her name, where you met her, that kind of thing—I can try to find out what happened. Maybe she lived a fulfilling life. It won't stop you from missing her, but it might—"

"I think you've got what you came for."

The nurse bites her lip, stands, tucks the tissues in her pocket, and straightens the papers on her clipboard. "Is there anything you need?" she asks gently.

Steve needs to get out of this—this sterile place, this nightmare, this _future_ , preferably out of his skin entirely. He needs another chance at Bucky's hand, needs to tell Peggy he isn't taking a set of dogtags as proof of anything; hell, he needs his mother to stroke his hair and tell him how she coped with losing Steve's dad, can SHIELD arrange that?

"I need some time," he manages, although time's caused him nothing but heartache, because the curtain hasn't fallen yet and _time_ is a safe answer. "I just—I knew it on some level, but I didn't think—I didn't. Think. I need some time alone."

"I'll find someone to sit with you," the nurse replies, like she missed his last word entirely, her eyes big and her voice thick with sorrow and Steve can't. Can't abide the thought of another uniformed stranger who'll look at him with awestruck sympathy and make kind and respectful conversation about how terribly Steve must miss _her_ —he can't. But it figures, despite all that's changed since he went to sleep, that bereavement watch in the 21st century would work pretty much the way it did in the 20th. Of course they won't let him alone; he hasn't been completely alone since—

Steve feels an incongruous urge to laugh. _Keep it together._ Of course SHIELD won't risk leaving Captain America to his own devices while he's in bereavement, but they might just be professional enough—impersonal enough—to let him mourn in peace.

"Don't bother with a watch," Steve says. "I have the cameras."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Starting to think I should rename this series "Steve holds conversations about Bucky with random female characters." I promise the action will pick up again shortly.

It gets better, in an incremental way, over time. It gets better when he meets the Avengers; having a team again, uniting against a common enemy, fighting something outside of his own thoughts. SHIELD takes him off watch, apparently satisfied that if he meant to kill himself, he would have let Loki handle it. Flawed reasoning—as if Steve would give up while there's work to be done—but he takes his newfound freedom on a cross-country road trip, and the changes in scenery help. It helps, in Columbus, when his bike breaks down and the mechanic waves off payment with a heartfelt "thank you for your service." The Mall of America helps by displaying a shelf of Bucky Bears with silky fur, one of which Steve purchases. It helps, in a roadside motel fifty miles later, when he cries himself to sleep for the first time since 1933. It helps when he starts flipping channels at midnight, in another motel, and finds two men in a sitcom arguing over whose last name to give a baby girl. (He cries again.)

And it helps, paradoxically, when Tony Stark strong-arms him into a night on the town.

He's back in New York, thinking vaguely about apartment leases and sources of income and calling a place _home_ even though it isn't. If he ever sees the inside of his particular SHIELD base again, he might punch through another wall, so instead he takes Tony Stark up on his standing offer to "see how great the renovations to Stark Tower are gonna be."

He finds not only Tony Stark but also Natasha Romanoff, with a complicated story about PR and Fury's orders that Steve isn't sure he believes; more likely Fury's orders have less to do with PR than with keeping the Avengers' less stable members on the radar. She and Tony both seem equally glad for the distraction Steve's presence provides. Especially when they think they can shock his delicate 20th-century sensibilities.

"Anyway, as I was saying, best hot wings in Manhattan come from the hands-free club ten blocks from here. They don't deliver, so these are the second-best hot wings in Manhattan." Tony takes a bite and wipes his mouth. Then he waggles his fingers. "You know what I mean by hands-free, right, Cap?"

"I think I've got the gist," Steve answers cautiously. They're eating bare-handed at the moment—hot wings being too messy for gloves, which makes them a distinctly _intimate_ food, or at least a casual one meant for informal gatherings of close friends, and Steve had wondered at Tony's decision to order them—but apart from that, he's seen advertisements for hands-free establishments. Each one features some variation on an attractive, smiling man and woman twining their fingers together. Steve wonders how many soulmates find each other that way. He wonders how many pretend to do so, for a night.

"It's not indecent when you think about it," Natasha says, misinterpreting his silence—or maybe interpreting it better than he'd like to admit. "You go in looking to be swept off your feet. Meet the right person, and that's exactly what happens. Don't meet them, it's like any other night out."

Steve opens his mouth to ask if Natasha speaks from experience, then thinks better of it. Natasha's gloves cover her to the shoulder, translucent black and form-fitting and of a presumably SHIELD-invented material that mimics the texture of human skin. He's never seen her without them. He's wondered, in fact, if they might not be gloves but elaborate tattoos, though he'll never ask.

He won't ask if she's read his SHIELD file, either.

Tony sips his water and continues. "But my point is, we should all go. I miss those wings. Pepper doesn't like me eating there unsupervised, and let's face it, I don't blame her. Can't be too careful when you're fostering. But she'd trust you guys to keep me in line."

"Fostering?" Steve knew they weren't bonded, but not that they were trying for a bond. Somehow Tony never struck him as the type to delay gratification like that, spending years to coax into existence something that other people stumble on by accident. But hell, that's not fair; if Tony's proven one thing, it's that he defies Steve's attempts to get the measure of him. Steve nods. "Good for you. Pepper's a lucky lady."

"Yeah, I guess back in the Dark Ages that's how everyone did it."

Steve forces a chuckle. "Not everyone. Maybe not even most people. But there were stricter rules, those days. Better to put in the time and effort to foster a bond with someone _suitable_ than to flare with someone of the wrong... anything. Race. Religion. Gender."

Tony leans toward Natasha and mutters, plenty loud enough to hear, "Are you showing him 'Brokeback Mountain', or am I?"

Natasha murmurs back, "I thought we'd start him off easy with 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner'."

"I've read up on civil rights," Steve interrupts, feeling abruptly like he's back in primary school, watching the girls gossip behind their hands and shoot him pitying looks. "I know there's no such thing as a _wrong_ soulmate, anymore." He stands, suddenly restless, and wonders if Stark Tower has a still-functional gym.

"Everything okay, Steve?" Natasha sits up straight as he passes.

"Yeah, everything's great. Long arc of the moral universe, better late than never, right? I'm going for a run." He shuts the door behind him, not quite in time to block out Tony saying _What's got his tights in a twist?_

~*~

They arrive at the club while it's still half-light out, Tony joking about grandparents and "early bird specials" and Natasha unexpectedly siding with Steve; Tony has a fiancee at home and Steve's last night out was spent at an English pub in 1945, she observes. They don't exactly fit the late-night demographic. Still, Tony grins as he high-fives the doorman (both of them gloved) and talks them through the door and across a dimly-lit floor to the seating area. Some tables are already occupied, as are most of the seats at the bar. As Steve anticipated, many patrons—especially the women—seem to have taken the "hands-free" theme as an invitation to bare not just their hands but as much arm, back, leg, and even chest as possible within the bounds of public decency. A very young-looking brunette in a red dress bats her eyelashes as they walk by. Steve tries not to stare.

Tony orders a party platter of hot wings and a pitcher of beer, then drops what Steve identifies as the first Tony-bombshell of the night:

"All right, Sleeping Beauty, here's the deal. We can't let you pass up this opportunity, it's our duty as friends. So we're not leaving till you shake a girl's hand. No pressure, I've got no plans. Romanoff doesn't count. Do those gloves even come off?"

Steve's attention snaps to Natasha, who only smiles and says in her most alluring voice, "Wouldn't you like to know." She doesn't argue Tony's conditions, and Steve would feel churlish objecting for himself. Fine. He knows, even if they don't, that he's at no risk of flaring. One is all you get. And Lord knows he's shaken enough strangers' hands in his lifetime. He can do it without wearing gloves, easy.

Did he say easy? He meant terrifying. He'd rather walk down Broadway buck naked; at least then he wouldn't have to make eye contact while doing it. Make eye contact and try not to remember how Bucky hated women flashing their skin at Steve.

They eat and drink, the club slowly fills with people and music, and Steve does recon. He's avoiding the dance floor, he decides quickly; too close, too much skin, how do you even know whom you're touching? Near the bar, men and women flirt over drinks, leaning close, resting their arms on the countertop. Some are touching outright, linking hands between their chairs in thinly-veiled attempts at discretion. A few take a strictly utilitarian approach: they'll introduce themselves, shake hands, laugh awkwardly, and move on to the next. Would that satisfy Tony and Natasha? Or do they expect Steve to try harder, to make a personal connection? Tony probably secretly hopes Steve will take a girl to one of the private rooms in back, soulmate or no.

At a table in the far corner, he sees a dark-haired woman sitting across from a blonde, deep in conversation. They look almost out-of-place; not on their phones nor scanning the bar for likely candidates; dressed in the current trends but without any ridiculous holes sewn into their clothing. He can't quite pinpoint why—something about their postures, somehow—but if anyone in this place is just here to relax after a long week, not looking to mingle at all, he'd put money on these two. He can offer them drinks and introduce himself, they can turn him down with some prepared excuse; it'll be a good effort, or at least look like one.

He shifts in his seat for a better look, thinking he'll ask the waiter to send over two more of whatever they're drinking; that's how it's done, right? Then he sees their hands and wonders how he missed the obvious.

It's not just how they touch: skin-on-skin but absently, without any of the nervous energy pervading the hand-shakers and flirters at the bar. It's the way they drift together, like magnets—talking, gesturing, and drinking cocktails, but whenever one hand comes to rest on the tabletop, the other is drawn to it. Obvious, now that he's looking. The blonde laughs at something the dark-haired one hasn't quite finished saying. The dark-haired one reaches forward in the same instant a lock of hair falls across the blonde's face, and the blonde tips her head to have it tucked back.

Steve watches, entranced, long enough that the dark-haired one catches his eye. She frowns, mutters something to her soulmate, and the blonde turns. They have eerily similar glares.

Oops.

Steve slides out of his chair and approaches their table, hands raised in a placating gesture. Then he remembers he's gloveless, has no idea what message that sends in this particular context, and clasps them behind his back just to be safe.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to stare. It's just—it's nice, you know? You look nice together. I mean—of course you're both very pretty, but that's not what I'm saying—" He flinches because this is a _disaster_ —"point is, I'm sorry. Can I buy your next round? As an apology. Then I'll get out of your hair."

The blonde's face softens. The brunette's does not.

"We're not interested," the brunette says slowly, as if speaking to a child. "She's not available. I'm not available. We're _not_ looking for a third. We don't care what you think—"

"Danae, it's fine. He apologized."

"Only because he got caught. We're not here to put on a show. So you take your sad little fantasies and—"

" _Danae!_ " The blonde sounds like she's trying for outrage while holding back a giggle.

Steve's raises his hands again, this time in something more like defense. "I'm not—it's nothing like that! You want to know what I was thinking? I was thinking how lucky you were, to have each other. Every other soul in this place is here because we're lonely, I don't care what my friend says about the hot wings, it's true—and then there's you. You don't need anyone else. You sure as hell don't need me interrupting your evening, and I don't blame you for telling me to butt out. I just wanted you to know, the reason I stared—I think I forgot what real happiness looked like."

The blonde has practically melted. She takes Danae's hand and raises it into full view, resting their forearms on the table. Danae shoots her a betrayed look.

"Tonight's our third anniversary," the blonde says. "What gave it away?"

"I'm sorry, gave it away?"

"Singles can't usually tell a bonded couple when they see one. At least not most of the guys here."

"I wasn't always," Steve says without thinking, and freezes.

Their eyes widen in tandem, and Steve realizes that once again, he's going to need to explain himself.

"Bonded years ago. We were practically kids. It was an accident, you know?" He pauses, still feeling an uncomfortable twinge at the admission. The women only nod. Goddamn 21st century, where nobody bats an eye if you've flared, but Bucky will never see it...

"Anyway, it was—good. Didn't have much good in our lives for a while, but we had each other. You know how it goes, better than most." Odd, how secrets too private to share with friends can spill so easily to strangers. Steve allows himself a taste of memory—those early days, wrapped up in each other, forgetting the reality outside their door for hours at a time.

"What happened?" The blonde is clutching her soulmate's hand, knuckles white.

Steve shakes his head, at his own nostalgia and plenty of other things besides. "We were military. Things happen."

The blonde opens her mouth, probably to offer condolences, and Steve meant to leave it at that, truly; it's the polite version, for polite company. But he's already told more of the truth than he'll ever admit to anyone again, and it's like trying to shut a floodgate—the words push _back_.

"Did an op in the mountains. He was under my command. It ended in a firefight, we were outnumbered, but you have to understand, we did this every day. It was just another op, but it was in the mountains, and he fell over the edge. I saw him fall. Nobody could've lived through that, it was such a long way down, and I saw it happen. But the worst part is, the fall didn't kill him. But I couldn't—" now the words trip over themselves, because now comes the part that's _his fault_ — "I thought, I couldn't help him, I didn't know—I don't know what I was thinking, I—made some bad decisions. Woke up in a hospital, and he was gone. The fall didn't kill him but something did. I wish I could at least say it was quick. But I don't know."

Steve could run ten miles and end up less exhausted than he feels right now.

"My God," Danae whispers. "I'm so sorry."

Steve blinks, reorienting. 2012, a hands-free bar, two women whose cocktail hour he's quite possibly ruined. He flashes a stage-tour smile.

"I'm the one who should apologize. You came here to celebrate, not listen to some sad stranger's tale of woe. Enjoy the rest of your evening, and congratulations." He half-reaches to shake hands, then remembers the uniquely awkward connotation of shaking hands in this place. He covers the motion by flagging down a passing waiter, long enough to say _Whatever else they've got, put it on my tab._ Then he threads his way back to his own table, where Tony and Natasha are attacking a second platter of hot wings with a vigor that tells him they've only been at it for the few seconds he's had them in his line of sight.

"How'd it go?" Natasha asks with her mouth full, in a show of disinterest that would be convincing if Tony weren't leaning forward eagerly, his own plate forgotten.

"Both taken," Steve replies, because he doesn't want to get into the details. He risks a final glance in their direction. The blonde woman has dragged her chair around the table and buried her face in Danae's shoulder. They whisper and cling to each other, drinks forgotten. Steve looks away, guilt turning his stomach.

"Never mind them, then. The night is young." Tony raises his mostly-empty glass and clinks it against Steve's full one, where it sits on the table. Steve ought to muster an argument, but his thoughts are scattered, and it's with distant relief that he hears Natasha say _Leave him be, Stark, he's had enough for one night._

~*~

Steve understands ghost stories better, now. He's heard them all his life, of course—tales of forgotten souls trapped in graveyards and abandoned homes. Some are angry, with grudges to settle, and those always made sense. But the others, the ones that haunt or worse, the ones shut out and wandering, with no place to call home—they don't _mean_ to harm or frighten the living, Steve has realized. It just happens, because they're ghosts. They see life, and warmth, and vitality and love and they _remember_ it, and they reach out; they can't help it. But their hands are cold. They see life and try to bask in it, but instead, all they touch withers. They're too cold to live.

At least now he understands.


End file.
